Free Luna Marine by Ian Douglas

the Net don’t do the real thing justice.”
    â€œYeah. Well, maybe we’ll find another Chamber at Picard. This Billaud character must be working on something pretty big.”
    The mountains were rising rapidly to meet the bug, their shadow now a misshapen black spider rippling up the slope ahead as though to escape them. The hillsides facingthe sun were so bright; Kaitlin had heard somewhere that the actual color of moonrock and regolith was dark, darker, in fact, than coal…but that it appeared bright in contrast to the empty sky around it. She found such facts counterintuitive, however. It looked as bright as any white beach sand she’d ever seen. Dow gave another gentle tap to the thrusters, and the bug drifted higher, easily clearing the age-eroded crest of the slope.
    The threat warning LED lit up in a flashing constellation of red.
    â€œWe’re being painted,” she said. The words were calm, unemotional, but suddenly her heart was pounding inside her chest. “Looks like traffic-control radar.”
    â€œI see it. Maybe they’ll lose us against the mountains.”
    The bug was dropping again, falling abruptly into shadow as it descended the inner face of the Crisium Ringwall. Ahead, the Mare Crisium stretched away clear to the black shadow of the terminator, flat and nearly featureless, the surface far darker than the sun-dazzled highlands had been. A large crater, flattened into a deeply shadowed oval by perspective, lay almost directly ahead.
    â€œPicard,” Dow said, checking his displays. “Bang on target.”
    The warning LEDs continued to show a strong radar signal coming from the crater ahead, though the mountains behind them might well be masking them from detection. Dow gentled the controls, smoothing and slowing the bug’s descent with several rapid-fire bursts from the attitude-control thrusters.
    â€œBetter let your Marines know we’re almost there,” he said. The oval of Picard was growing larger second by second, and also flatter, until all that was visible was a sunlit smear of smooth-shaped mountains, the crater’s ringwall extending above the surface of the darker basaltic sea. The LSCP had descended to within two hundred meters of the mare’s surface, below the top of the crater rim. Kaitlin approved. If the radar was coming from a grounded ship or lobber inside the crater basin, they should have just dropped below its horizon.
    The threat indicator stayed on, however. That suggestedthat someone was watching them from the crater rim. It also suggested that that someone was waiting for them, waiting and ready for their arrival.
    â€œHeads up, Marines,” she called over the platoon channel. “Target in sight. It looks like they see us coming, so be ready to unstrap and bounce as soon as I give the word.”
    Dow hit the main thrusters again, dropping the craft’s nose to accelerate toward the target. Kaitlin found herself twisting her body so that she could peer up through her helmet visor at the rimwall mountains as they filled the cockpit’s forward window. She knew she ought to be watching the graphic displays instead—those carried more information than the naked-eye view out the bow of the LSCP—but she found herself wrestling with the terribly human urge to see the threat directly, instead of as it was implied by the craft’s electronics. Additional red LED readouts were winking on now, indicating other radar transmitters joining the first.
    â€œI think—” she said, then stopped. A dazzling star appeared on the mountaintop, winking on, then off with the suddenness of a camera’s strobe.
    â€œDid you see that?” Dow asked. Apparently, he preferred looking with his eyes instead of electronics as well.
    â€œSure did. There…to the right a bit.”
    â€œYour call. Pass it by, or have a look?”
    â€œWe look,” she decided. “Definitely. We’re